Maybe if the city didn't make a huge push for low income housing that would
help their tax revenue shortfall. If the city made an effort to remove drug
homes, peoples dogs taking care of their business on residential lawns with no
clean up from the owner, or peoples yards used by customers of surrounding
businesses to dump their drinks and leave their trash. Then you might have a
draw of decent people that maintain their homes and pay higher taxes. But, why
live there if the city caters to everyone else but the working class?

Mayor Becker is governing the way Republicans claim to legislate. It's
become a truism in politics that the fewer things one claims to value, the more
likely those same things end up being the most negotiable. Budgetary obligations
are only revisable when a Democrat is in office. The nat'l debt only
burdens society when a Dem is in office. If something is true, then it
doesn't matter who holds the office. The tea party has been less of an
experiment in returning to a smaller government and more of an attempt at
redemption by Republicans who couldn't be bothered with scrutinizing
government when their team was on the field. On the other hand, Dems need to
take the opportunity to spotlight their better candidates for higher office.
Fiscal responsibility and long-term sustainability should be among the highest
priorities, in both expansionary and recessionary years.

Unlike most liberal-leaning publications and liberals in general, the typically
conservative Des news and mostly republican population of our state can
acknowledge something good happening, even when it crosses party lines.

Ralph Becker is learning a thing or two about fiscal responsibility, and I
applaud him for it

Re: "To look for ways to maximize economic opportunities, Becker has asked
State Auditor John Dougall to work with him . . . ."

In other
words, find ways to squeeze more tax money out of us.

If the mayor
genuinely wanted to increase revenues, he'd remove liberal impediments to
business growth, stop all the carbon footprint nonsense, and make downtown more
friendly to real people, who might drive there to engage in commerce, but
who'll never utilize the dangerous, inconvenient, overly expensive
collectivized transport liberals have anointed as the hallmark their brave, new
dark-age world.

I noticed they were VERY careful on the wording. They put "Fiscally
RESPONSIBLE budget", not "Fiscally Conservative budget" in the
headline.

I think it would be excellent for a Democrat Mayor to get
credit for submitting a Fiscally CONSERVATIVE Budget. It would show that
we're not that far apart, and Democrats can conserve and live within their
means, and you CAN get fiscal responsibility from either party (and
irresponsible behavior from either party).

Any budget that fills the
community's needs AND lives within the Government's needs (not putting
the people in debt)... is something that should be praised IMO... regardless of
the party that did it...

@procuradorfiscal - Your distain for science and public investment is quite
concerning. If you conviction against scientific evidence and research is so
strong, you may want to live by your beliefs and stop utilizing modern
technology, i.e. computers, internet, etc because it was scientists who brought
us these wonderful inventions.

mcdugall,I don't see how you got a disdain for science or technology
from procuradorfiscal's comment.

Re: " you may want to live
by your beliefs and stop utilizing modern technology, i.e. computers, internet,
etc because it was scientists who brought us these wonderful
inventions."...

It was the Department of Army that developed the
original Internet (some of them were scientists I guess). The same dang
military industrial complex the Left hates. Later it was made usable and
accessible by the masses by private industry. So both contributed to it. Same
goes for Computers...

@2 bits, I think you have your history wrong my friend The first message was
sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's
laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network
node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

Re: "Your distain for science and public investment is quite
concerning."

Oh, don't be concerned. I have no disdain for
science. I reserve my disdain for those that try to pervert science, using it as
a hustle to sell their snake oil. Like when climate "scientists" fail to
confirm their wild hypotheses to any reasonable confidence level, or using
anything recognizable as the scientific method, but try to sell pet political
conclusions, anyway, using what amounts to a popularity poll to unfairly support
the unsupportable and to cow those asking for actual data or analysis.

I'm also somewhat disdainful of propagandists that feel they can fool
people by using misleading liberal newspeak to hide the truth. Like calling
grinding overtaxation "public investment."